The Modern Stoic #12: Rich On Paper, Poor On Life

A letter that hammers home the need to put your WHY first – to find your mindset and your outlook before you do anything else; on avoiding becoming the slave to money in all that you do; the swamp of accumulating possessions; how to do what you truly want now, not later; and how to make sense of Stoicism not as a prescription, but as guidelines for what to emphasise in life.

Do you dream of getting rich? Would all your problems magically disappear? Well, they wouldn’t. Not unless you consciously know why you want to get rich.

Your mindset determines how you see and interpret your world and your engagement with it; this is true in wealth as much as in poverty, and in this episode we explore how to cultivate a mind that can endure and thrive in all conditions.

First off, are you pursuing your Why? If not, there’s huge danger involved in devoting too much time to building someone else’s dream. Where’s the time for you to grow and develop for your own sake?

We go well beyond the usual feel-good soundbites about following your passion to outline just how difficult and emotionally draining this can be. It might be worth it, but we too easily gloss over the pain involved, so the shock of it when we feel it can send us scurrying back into our life-sapping 9-to-5s before we even get started.

The Stoics advise us not to care about material wealth. But this can come in different forms: Steve Jobs is a prime example of someone who didn’t care about money because he thought himself invincible anyway. As Dre explains, that helped him to succeed… but also got him killed.

Seneca advises us to live only with the bare necessities (prompting us to relive our Jungle Book days), but the aim isn’t to starve ourselves without cause. Learn what you’re capable of and test your limits, but don’t pretend that’s going to be pleasant or worth pursuing for its own sake. The point is how it can help us live a good and fulfilling life.

Dre also gets personal and shares his story of a recent business deal gone horribly wrong … and how he nearly became trapped waiting for that fabled but fatal ‘perfect moment’ to escape. Oh, and he promptly unleashes Quantum Stoicism on us, before Jon puts him safely back in his (Schrödinger’s) box.

About The Author

After spending far too many years in educational institutions, Jon got a PhD in History but is now finally learning something about the real world and the people in it. He always felt that science and scholarship needed more dick jokes and is on a mission to redress that balance. He writes, talks, travels, sings, and has a problematic relationship with cake and coffee.